Nicole schreibt...

After years of mostly using the Eurostar I had to be stuck with plane tickets to London (or rather a voucher from British Airways from January's trip in the middle of Covid mayhem) in the Summer of Ultimate Airport Chaos. Not surprisingly, British Airways cancelled their flight on me a month ago, leaving me in a flap and without the option to switch to the Eurostar as I already cheapskated on the Travelodge in Hounslow near Heathrow at the other end of town. So overpriced godawful Eurowings it was and some fretting about THEIR last-minute cancellations as well as supposedly insane lines in front of security at both Cologne and Heathrow. And of course all the hyped-up drama in the press wasn’t all that dramatic in the end – an hour’s waiting time for security on the Cologne side and even less in London. At least flying made up to me by this gorgeous view over central London on approaching Heathrow with the whole metropolis at my feet, so here's a photo of what's probably the square mile of the world I love the most.
This whole extra trip had come about for one particular reason, but sadly there was little else new that really tickled me. For some years I enjoyed seeing as many actors and actresses of my then favourite TV show Game of Thrones live on stage and though it’s been some time, I decided, I’d still give The Seagull with Emilia Clarke and Indira Varma a go, even though it meant dealing with another Jamie Lloyd production. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m fine with directors overhauling classics and trying new different approaches.. when it’s classics I’m familiar with or when the new version is at least interesting (such as Lloyd's earlier completely nuts Doctor Faustus starring fellow GoT alumnus Kit Harington).
Sadly, Chekhov’s Seagull was neither. I didn’t know the plot beyond Chekhov’s usual shtick of “rich Russian folks moping around the countryside” and Lloyd didn’t bother with either stage sets or costumes. Basically for the entire duration of the play people sat barefoot and in everyday wear in green plastic chairs inside a wooden box and recited the text at each other... which… sorry, is something I am fine with on the fringe when the director has a budget of £1.65 found down the back of the sofa, but not in the West End.
Sure, these were still top actors, doing a great job with the text, but it still left me rather underwhelmed and it didn’t help that Indira Varma, who I had even more wanted to see live than Emilia Clarke was still off (my love story with her goes back all the way to Kamasutra after all!). At least Emilia did a fine job as young aspiring actress Nina and as per usual her eyebrows deserve an acting award all of their own. Indira’s stand-in Tina Harris as Arkadina was also fine, as were the males of the show such as beefcakey Tom Rhys Harries as writer/ladies’ man Trigorin and Daniel Monks (who rose to fame as the first genuinely physically impaired actor to play Richard III in Teenage Dick at the Donmar) as Arkadina’s whiny son Konstantin, aka the suffering genius. Was it all worth sitting through? Yes, I think so. Unlike the tedious Cock earlier with its relationship blather, at least the characters in The Seagull have something more interesting to say about life in general and more interesting interactions with each other. Still, I know now that I’ll never book for another Lloyd production again until I’ve at least read the reviews and see what nonsense he has come up with next time. If I want shitty staging, I have oodles of Regietheater to choose from over here after all!
The main event came the next day. I may have been twenty years late to The West Wing party, but arrive I finally did last year (for typically daft reasons I shan't dwell on) and fell totally in love with Aaron Sorkin’s incredible writing. I finally understood why everyone in New York had been so buzzed about his stage adaption of Harper Lee’s seminal novel "To Kill A Mockingbird" and knew that a) I needed to see this and b) I needed to see this with captions to not miss a word. Luckily my fellow West Wing nerd was eager to go as well (CJ and Sam in da house!) and so we met up in the West End early on Saturday for a chat and a wonderful Scottish lunch (no haggis this time for me!), before heading to the matinee at the Gielgud Theatre, where they had set us up with brilliant front row seats in the Dress Circle. And what can I say, production-wise Mockingbird was everything that Seagull was not: Gorgeous stage sets that evoked the stuffy sultry American south, period costumes and a large cast. And Sorkin’s brilliant script didn’t disappoint. While the novel is already more than half done by the time we finally get to the trial of Tony Robinson, a black man (wrongly) accused of raping a white girl in 30s segregated racist Alabama, Sorkin starts us off with the trial right away, mixing it with other scenes to establish more background. The children who take center stage in the book – narrator Scout (Gwyneth Keyworth), her brother Jem (Harry Redding) and their friend Dill (David Moorst) – are played by adults here, but for me it worked perfectly well with them looking as young as they did. Most interesting was the shift in leading man Atticus Finch, played by Rafe Spall in London, who came across as nearly saintly in the book and earlier movie. But as Sorkin writes in the programme, he knew that things had changed and Atticus is actually challenged both by his children and by black housekeeper Calpurnia (a part very much augmented and rightly so and brilliantly played by Pamela Nomvete) for trying to excuse what cannot be excused. Or as Karl Popper put it: No tolerance towards the intolerant. And it’s almost breathtaking how contemporary the story still feels so many years later with the #blacklivematters protests fresh in everyone’s minds and the spectre of Trump and other racist creepozoids haunting elections not just in the USA but everywhere in the West. The nearly three hours almost flew by and my only thought when leaving the theatre was “They need to film this, so I can see it again”. Let’s hope it will happen. As I had already suspected, I wasn’t up for much after three hours of intense court drama, so after saying goodbye to my friend, I bought some food from Pret and hung around Embankment Gardens before it was finally time for my evening show, which had crept up to become one of my favourites in recent years: Six. Even when I had first seen it at the Arts Theatre I had been a bit dubious about it, so I had gone for the £22.50 steal in row J, which served me well enough then. But I did want to see it from closer up and had a brilliant seat for the short run at the Lyric Theatre that I had to sacrifice on the Altar of Corona. So now it was the Vaudeville Theatre on the Strand that has become the Queens’ new permanent and always sold out home (or Haus Full as their board amusingly reads) and in the meantime Six has also become a pop-cultural phenomenon that defies description. What’s left to say about this little work of genius that Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss cobbled together within a few days as students? Yes, it’s more a pop concert than a musical, now more than ever with the Queens at times interacting with the audience and the mostly young female fans reacting accordingly, but doesn’t make it less valuable to me. Much like a certain other show I’m tediously going on about a lot at the moment, it’s all about the brilliance of the lyrics and how much they convey, plus in this case properly feminist writing that doesn’t need to destroy old or modern classics to score some contrived woke points. I was surrounded by a sea of female teens in the front rows (most taken by a parent it seemed) and frankly, if I had a teenage daughter, I would be so glad to see her adapt the Queens as role models when I think of the dreary whiny female characters when I first became interested in musicals in the late 80s (and which still persist in new German musicals that never developed further). The new cast was pretty much great, although just like the first time, the performer I most wanted to see (in this case Amy di Bartolomeo) was off. And once again it was really “Get Down”, one of the more tedious songs to listen to on the cast recording, that was absolutely fantastic live by the amazing Dionne Ward-Anderson. I don’t need to see Six over and over again, but I’m really just happy that it exists and I hope it will keep going and going and make so many young fans happy in the process. Here's the Megasix of the Queens I saw live: